Incrementally Improving PowerPlay - Turmoil ordering of systems is decided by difference between fort and UM levels, ignoring 100% cap

CMDR Foursyth

CMDR Foursyth
This is part of a series of proposals to improve PowerPlay in various ways. The goal is to make PowerPlay a more interesting, dynamic, and rewarding experience, without needing to scrap the whole thing and rebuild from the ground up - evolution rather than revolution. Each proposal is intended to be relatively straightforward to implement (though of course we have no special insight into the specifics of the Elite codebase), and most of them (except where mentioned) stand alone and do not need a lot of other changes to make them work.

Please limit discussions to the specific topic at hand - pros, cons, tweaks, etc. If you have alternative proposals, by all means make a separate topic! The parent thread for this series is here: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...out-incrementally-improving-powerplay.551571/ Although the authors are Winters/FLC commanders, these proposals have been made and discussed by pilots from many Powers.

Turmoil ordering of systems is decided by difference between fort and UM levels, ignoring 100% cap

Proposed change: When making the sorted list of systems to enter turmoil, or to enter revolt, use the difference between fortification and undermining, without applying the 100% cap on either. Instead, if the fortification is 100% more than the undermining, even if both are above 100%, the system is counted as fortified. If the undermining is 100% more than the fortification, even if both are above 100%, the system is counted as undermined. If fortification and undermining are within 100% of each other, the system is counted as neutral or cancelled.

Discussion:

To restate the status: calculate the value (fort%)-(um%) and classify:
Higher than +100%: count as fortified.
Between +100% and -100%: count as default/cancelled
Lower than -100%: count as undermined

This proposal does NOT affect the amount of CC calculated, nor the decision about whether or not a power goes into turmoil - those calculations continue to apply the 100% caps as they currently do.

However, once the CC calculations have been made in the standard way, and it's decided that a power will be in turmoil, a prioritised list of systems is considered to satisfy the CC deficit - either to enter turmoil, or to revolt entirely. It is the relative ordering of the systems in this list that this proposal modifies. The current problem is that with 5th Column activities, a lot of turmoils, whether caused by outside attack or as “self-turmoils” intended to shed unprofitable systems, end up with most or all of the power's systems fully fortified and fully undermined. Since no more effort can be done by either side, because more than 100% fort or UM is pointless, that is the end state. This leads to very boring and predictable results with neither side able to achieve any surprising goal. This stagnates PowerPlay, increases the penalties for risky moves, and decreases the incentive to put other powers into turmoil.

With this change, removing the 100% cap allows real battles for specific systems to occur. If one power wishes to strip a specific system during turmoil, it can keep on undermining that system beyond the nominal 100% mark, and beyond the fortification of the defenders, and this will move the system higher in the list so that it will be more likely to be turmoiled or revolt. Conversely if the power being attacked wishes to retain this system, they can continue fortifying, and if they can beat the undermining by more than 100% they will move the systems far lower on the list, increasing the chances of keeping it.

Again, the standard 100% cap still applies when calculating CC and when deciding whether or not a power goes into turmoil. Most of the time, powers still only need to fortify to 100%, and attackers only need to undermine to 100% to affect CC. It is ONLY if the power actually becomes turmoiled that the excess fort/UM values are used, and then only to decide which systems go into turmoil first.

Examples:
Fort 16%, UM 129%: system is counted as undermined (as is currently the case)
Fort 34%, UM 129%: although UM hit 100%, it did not exceed fortification by more than 100%, so the system is still counted as normal/cancelled.
Fort 468%, UM 483%: system is counted as cancelled.
Fort 468%, UM 367%: system is counted as fortified.

Open question: rather than a rigid three-state fort/neither/UM classification, maybe a more gradual scale would be interesting to examine?

Open question: rather than a three-state fort/neither/UM classification, should it be a simple binary question of which of the two is greater?
 

Charlemagne42

C
I'd like to talk about a gradual scale. In the context of Turmoil, I think what this would mean is that the systems with the greatest difference between UM percent and Fort percent drop first, which is a fine way to organise the drop order and makes more sense than the current solution.

But how does this affect the amount of CC the Power has? How does the Turmoil know when to stop? Remember, it won't stop removing systems until the Power's CC balance exceeds 0. If all systems are both Forted and UMed way past 100%, then the CC the Power must regain by removing systems is exactly equal to the starting deficit, regardless of how deeply they were launched into Turmoil by being UMed the prior week. Any Power in Turmoil would make certain all their good systems had been Forted as much as possible, and try to leave their bad systems un-Forted, and also try to arrange for their bad systems to be UMed to death and back. At the same time their enemies would make certain the good systems were UMed, while leaving the bad systems un-touched and hoping that some saboteur comes along to Fort them - after all, even if the Power manages to drop some bad systems because they can keep their good systems' Fort-UM differential above their bad systems, they will drop fewer bad systems than they might have, if only those bad systems had remained un-Forted and the Power could exploit a larger deficit to drop more bad systems.

So 5C sabotage is still possible and effective, although maybe not as easy as before. But using the original suggestion, I think we can make 5C even more difficult to pull off during Turmoil.

Just determine whether a system's status is Fort, UM, or default for CC balance purposes by comparing the Fort and UM percents. If one exceeds the other by over 100%, then the system's status is that. Otherwise it's default. The Turmoiled Power's CC balance is calculated accordingly, and then the Turmoil order is determined explicitly by the absolute difference between UM% and Fort%. It would require a Power to expend a great amount of time, effort, and goodwill with allies, but if they can control with some precision how far their systems are Forted and UMed, they can effectively choose which systems to drop. And of course, their enemies can anticipate what they will try to drop, and selectively UM things to make it harder for them to do so. Importantly, the most effective way for an enemy Power to cause a defending Power to drop good systems during Turmoil will now be via UM.
 

Justinian Octavius

Justinian Octavius
It would be tactically better arguably than what we have now. However, turmoil itself would still be based upon economic turmoil so it would not solve 5C. 5C will still be able to overload Powers with loss making spheres to force a turmoil then fortify the loss making spheres to prevent them ending up on the turmoil list leaving the Power crippled. This proposal would only help combat 5C for large Powers who could have a large number of their commanders switch to an enemy Power to undermine the loss making spheres and even then it might not be possible due to the trigger ratio.

CMDR Justinian Octavius
 

Rubbernuke

Rubbernuke
If I remember right, Sandros proposal had:

Uncapped UM

(Vote to) drop systems

Weighted expansions (so that 5C have to do exponentially more work)
 

CMDR Foursyth

CMDR Foursyth
The problem with changing the way CC is calculated is the increased workload. If you can't say a system is "finished" when it hits 100% forted, it's a perpetual stress-fest about whether or not you're going to be free from turmoil every... single... cycle - because a determined-enough opposition can snipe you to the moon by UMing to 205%.

Now maybe we as a community want that sort of knife-edge perpetual stress, but I as hauling director of a large power do not :) Anyway, that would be a separate proposal - I wanted to keep the scope of this one really small. Since the game doesn't actually expose the values it does this priority-ordering on (we've just reverse-engineered it from observation), it's pretty simple to change it. Whereas changing the actual CC computation is a far more obvious change that would require finesse and several cycles of tweaking.
 

Rubbernuke

Rubbernuke
CMDR Foursyth said:
The problem with changing the way CC is calculated is the increased workload. If you can't say a system is "finished" when it hits 100% forted, it's a perpetual stress-fest about whether or not you're going to be free from turmoil every... single... cycle - because a determined-enough opposition can snipe you to the moon by UMing to 205%.

Now maybe we as a community want that sort of knife-edge perpetual stress, but I as hauling director of a large power do not :) Anyway, that would be a separate proposal - I wanted to keep the scope of this one really small. Since the game doesn't actually expose the values it does this priority-ordering on (we've just reverse-engineered it from observation), it's pretty simple to change it. Whereas changing the actual CC computation is a far more obvious change that would require finesse and several cycles of tweaking.
Click to expand...

I think that at some point Powerplay has to err on the side of instability otherwise it will always be too stable and immobile- the galactic standing may move, but the underlying systems for each power do not- I mean, Pranav Antal shot into 4th because he had one expansion- thats insane. Mega UM is a good idea- but- and this is a massive thicc but: this mechanic only really makes gameplay sense if its in Open, because what its doing is drawing in players into a fluid mini CG battle organically:

Fortifiers have to keep on trucking otherwise defender loses, defenders have to protect incoming ships, fortifiers have to adapt to overcome any resistance, defenders can attack UMing ships, attackers can hit incoming fortifers, UM, disrupt defences, and so on.

Compare that to a multi mode version:

Haul, and shoot more NPCs.

It would be stressful with uncapped UM, but it would be like a combat CG popping up and much more varied.
 
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